Wikis

A wiki is a web site that allows any
visitor to edit or extend its content; the term "wiki" (from a
Hawaiian word meaning "quick" or "super-fast") is also used to refer
to the software that enables such editing. Wikis were invented in
1995, but their popularity has really started to take off since 2000
or 2001, boosted partly by the success of Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/), a wiki-based free-content
encyclopedia. Think of a wiki as falling somewhere between IRC and
web pages: wikis don't happen in realtime, so people get a chance to
ponder and polish their contributions, but they are also very easy to
add to, involving less interface overhead than editing a regular web
page.

Wikis are not yet standard equipment for open source projects,
but they probably will be soon. As they are relatively new
technology, and people are still experimenting with different ways of
using them, I will just offer a few words of caution here—at
this stage, it's easier to analyze misuses of wikis than to analyze
their successes.

If you decide to run a wiki, put a lot of effort into having a
clear page organization and pleasing visual layout, so that visitors
(i.e., potential editors) will instinctively know how to fit in their
contributions. Equally important, post those standards on the wiki
itself, so people have somewhere to go for guidance. Too often, wiki
administrators fall victim to the fantasy that because hordes of
visitors are individually adding high quality content to the site,
the sum of all these contributions must therefore also be of high
quality. That's not how web sites work. Each individual page or
paragraph may be good when considered by itself, but it will not be
good if embedded in a disorganized or confusing whole. Too often,
wikis suffer from:

Lack of navigational principles.
A well-organized web site makes visitors feel like they know
where they are at any time. For example, if the pages are
well-designed, people can intuitively tell the difference
between a "table of contents" region and a "content" region.
Contributors to a wiki will respect such differences too, but
only if the differences are present to begin with.

Duplication of information.
Wikis frequently end up with different pages saying similar
things, because the individual contributors did not notice the
duplications. This can be partly a consequence of the lack of
navigational principles noted above, in that people may not find
the duplicate content if it is not where they expect it to
be.

Inconsistent target audience.
To some degree this problem is inevitable when there are so many
authors, but it can be lessened if there are written guidelines
about how to create new content. It also helps to aggressively
edit new contributions at the beginning, as an example, so that
the standards start to sink in.

The common solution to all these problems is the same: have
editorial standards, and demonstrate them not only by posting them,
but by editing pages to adhere to them. In general, wikis will
amplify any failings in their original material, since contributors
imitate whatever patterns they see in front of them. Don't just
set up the wiki and hope everything falls into place. You must also
prime it with well-written content, so people have a template to
follow.

The shining example of a well-run wiki is Wikipedia, though this
may be partly
because the content (encyclopedia entries) is naturally well-suited to
the wiki format. But if you examine Wikipedia closely, you'll see
that its administrators laid a very thorough
foundation for cooperation. There is extensive documentation on how
to write new entries, how to maintain an appropriate point of view,
what sorts of edits to make, what edits to avoid, a dispute resolution
process for contested edits (involving several stages, including
eventual arbitration), and so forth. They also have authorization
controls, so that if a page is the target of repeated inappropriate
edits, they can lock it down until the problem is resolved. In other
words, they didn't just throw some templates onto a web site and hope
for the best. Wikipedia works because its founders thought carefully
about how to get thousands of strangers to tailor their writing to a
common vision. While you may not need the same level of preparedness
to run a wiki for a free software project, the spirit is worth
emulating.